Political Selection in the Skilled City
49 Pages Posted: 9 Jul 2014
Date Written: March 28, 2014
Abstract
This paper studies the impact of citizens’ human capital on the characteristics of elected politicians in democratic elections for the post of mayor. By using a change in the rules for Italian mayoral elections and a difference-in-differences estimator, I find that cities endowed with a larger amount of human capital tend to elect mayors that have a higher educational attainment and that were previously employed in skill-intensive jobs. This result is quantitatively small but robust to omitted variables or selection issues.
Keywords: human capital externalities, political selection, cities
JEL Classification: D7, I20, H8
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation